Linguaggio verbale e inconscio politico

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the key tenets of cognitive semantics were confirmed from both the theoretical and the empirical point of view. In my paper I investigate some recent developments of cognitive semantics in the understanding of political communication. According to George Lakoff, language refers to world insofar as it fits to the understanding of reality based on the body and brain. However, conceptual schemata differ significantly both from one individual to another and from a social group to another. In the political field the consequences of such differences are sometimes radical. In the spirit of embodied cognition, I will try to show some constraints of this variability in the way humans shape their experience using the body as a metaphorical source. Human body is a kind of “unconscious topics” for the structure of many linguistic strategies in political narratives.